Andrew Cuomo’s Dominoes

As news of numerous, exhaustively documented federal charges against New York Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver spread Thursday morning, the New York Daily News went looking for comment from Silver’s legislative colleagues. They found no shortage of pols who had long lived in fear of Silver—who was charged with taking several million dollars in bribes and kickbacks—but now are willing to turn on him. This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course. Most politicians, possessing unmatched self-preservation instincts, will distance themselves from an embattled colleague, and the alacrity with which they abandon him often speaks volumes about his behavior.

But one person who has worked closely with Silver didn’t attack or distance himself on this darkest of days for the speaker (who has expressed confidence in his eventual vindication). That would be Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

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“Obviously, it’s bad for the speaker,” Cuomo acknowledged Thursday. “But it’s also a bad reflection on government, and it adds to the negativity. And it adds to the cynicism and it adds to the ‘they’re all the same.’”

Why exactly would Cuomo go to such lengths not to impugn the inscrutable Silver, with whom he is not particularly close? Some Albany observers suggest that Cuomo once even contemplated a coup against Silver but wasn’t confident it would succeed, given that Silver had quashed a 2000 revolt led by his majority leader. So this does not appear to be a matter of personal friendship.

One explanation for Cuomo’s milquetoast statement may lie in some legislative maneuvering two years ago, when Cuomo was negotiating with Silver to try to enact a watered-down campaign finance “reform” bill, which he perhaps saw as the route to a New York Times endorsement for his re-election campaign.

In a state capital infamous for corruption, the bill was intended to be a critical part of Cuomo’s legacy—and the rationale for a potential national campaign. It promised to stiffen penalties for bribery and campaign violations, strengthen donation disclosure requirements and create a voluntary public campaign financing system for all statewide races. But once the legislation met the implacable legislature, Cuomo downsized the public financing mechanism to a pilot program covering only the office of the comptroller (who happens to be a longtime Cuomo antagonist).

Yet even this diluted version of the reform bill might have failed had Cuomo not sacrificed his other signature anti-corruption effort, the Moreland Commission. That’s where Silver comes in.

In 2013, the governor had charged the Moreland Commission with investigating state government corruption. According to the criminal complaint filed against Silver, as well as sources inside the commission, the speaker, who works as a lawyer outside of his government job, repeatedly refused to comply with commission requests to provide a description of the services he provided to his legal clients or a list of those clients, leading federal prosecutors to subpoena his firm. The Silver-led state assembly then filed a court motion to quash the commission’s subpoenas related to legislators’ outside income.

In exchange for allowing the campaign finance bill to pass, Silver allegedly demanded that Cuomo disband the commission, according to the complaint against Silver, and Cuomo— knowing that the commission was also examining the campaign spending of some of his largest donors—was apparently only too happy to oblige.

Silver has not publicly discussed these negotiations other than lambasting the commission’s inquiry into legislators’ outside income as a “ fishing expedition”—perhaps because he knew all along that the guiltiest fish in Albany was staring at him in the mirror every morning. Cuomo has variously asserted that he disbanded the commission because it accomplished its primary goal of persuading the legislature to pass an ethics bill, and because the state didn’t “ need another expensive prosecutor’s office”; while he originally called the commission “ 100 percent independent,” he later stated, “I can appoint it; I can disband it; I can appoint you; I can un-appoint you tomorrow.”

Abandoning the commission was a major trade-off for Cuomo. His Democratic primary opponent last year Zephyr Teachout, a law professor who studies corruption, used the commission’s demise to bludgeon the governor for acquiescing to Albany’s business-as-usual. Now, however, it appears the deal could have far more lasting implications for the reelected governor.

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Jeff Smith (@JeffSmithMO) is assistant professor of urban policy at The New School in New York City, and a former Missouri state senator. He is the author of Ferguson in Black and White and the forthcoming Mr. Smith Goes to Prison (St. Martin’s, 2015).